As many Wesleyans begin time away from campus this summer, it’s good to remember that the needs of Middletown continue beyond the academic year. One of the inspiring things we saw during the pandemic, was the level of care and cooperation that students showed their fellow citizens in Central Connecticut. We not only wanted to keep our campus healthy, we wanted to be responsible neighbors to those with whom we interacted in Middletown and beyond.
Wesleyan worked closely with the Community Health Center to facilitate vaccine delivery, and the ties between our organizations go way back. There are many nonprofits in the region that have benefitted from Wes energy, and the university has benefitted in turn. Many faith-based organizations, neighborhood support groups, and cultural organizations have worked closely with students, alumni, faculty and staff.
Wesleyan is a key part of a healthy Middletown ecosystem. One way to help the ecology of our region thrive is by supporting its not-for-profit sector. From mutual aid societies to food banks, our region has several organizations that we can support. A group of students sent me a list of some of them, and you can find here a more extensive listing.
I hope you will consider supporting one or more of these organizations that do vital work in sustaining our Middletown community.
This is good news. When I was at Wes, many of my fellow students seemed to feel that “townies” , as Middletown residents were then called, were a sort of inferior human being that we should not associate with or waste our valuable time on. Nevertheless, somehow or other, I, a Protestant, got to know a Catholic teenager and we found a mutual interest in some of the beautiful compositions by classical composers for various parts of the Catholic liturgy. He introduced me to some compositions unfamiliar to me and both of us enjoyed listening to them on the sound system I had constructed as part of the lab requirements for the electronics courses I had taken at Wes. It was a brief, but mutually beneficial friendship, and in the best of “town and gown” relationships.
Jim Wagner, ‘56